Wish poems
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No Need
© Alain Bosquet
The elephant's trunk
is for picking up pistachios:
no need to bend over.
The giraffe's neck
Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
Not in a silver casket cool with pearls
Or rich with red corundum or with blue,
Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls
Have given their loves, I give my love to you;
The Walk
© Johann Christoph Friedrich Von Schiller
Hail to thee, mountain beloved, with thy glittering purple-dyed summit!
Hail to thee also, fair sun, looking so lovingly on!
Thee, too, I hail, thou smiling plain, and ye murmuring lindens,
Ay, and the chorus so glad, cradled on yonder high boughs;
The Hostage
© Johann Christoph Friedrich Von Schiller
The tyrant Dionys to seek,
Stern Moerus with his poniard crept;
The watchful guard upon him swept;
The grim king marked his changeless cheek:
Fridolin (The Walk To The Iron Factory)
© Johann Christoph Friedrich Von Schiller
A gentle was Fridolin,
And he his mistress dear,
Savern's fair Countess, honored in
All truth and godly fear.
Endymion: Book I
© John Keats
This said, he rose, faint-smiling like a star
Through autumn mists, and took Peona's hand:
They stept into the boat, and launch'd from land.
The Eve Of St. Agnes
© John Keats
St. Agnes' Eve--Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Parable
© Richard Wilbur
I read how Quixote in his random ride
Came to a crossing once, and lest he lose
The purity of chance, would not decide
The Beautiful Changes
© Richard Wilbur
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.
The Writer
© Richard Wilbur
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
A Country Life:to His Brother, Mr Thomas Herrick
© Robert Herrick
Thrice, and above, blest, my soul's half, art thou,
In thy both last and better vow;
Could'st leave the city, for exchange, to see
The country's sweet simplicity;
The Maypole
© Robert Herrick
The May-pole is up,
Now give me the cup;
I'll drink to the garlands around it;
But first unto those
Whose hands did compose
The glory of flowers that crown'd it.
Wistful
© Carl Sandburg
WISHES left on your lips
The mark of their wings.
Regrets fly kites in your eyes.
The Sins of Kalamazoo
© Carl Sandburg
THE SINS of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.
The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab.
The Four Brothers
© Carl Sandburg
MAKE war songs out of these;
Make chants that repeat and weave.
Make rhythms up to the ragtime chatter of the machine guns;
Make slow-booming psalms up to the boom of the big guns.
Shenandoah
© Carl Sandburg
IN the Shenandoah Valley, one rider gray and one rider blue, and the sun on the riders wondering.
Piled in the Shenandoah, riders blue and riders gray, piled with shovels, one and another, dust in the Shenandoah taking them quicker than mothers take children done with play.
The blue nobody remembers, the gray nobody remembers, its all old and old nowadays in the Shenandoah.. . .
And all is young, a butter of dandelions slung on the turf, climbing blue flowers of the wishing woodlands wondering: a midnight purple violet claims the sun among old heads, among old dreams of repeating heads of a rider blue and a rider gray in the Shenandoah.
River Roads
© Carl Sandburg
LET the crows go by hawking their caw and caw.
They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines somewhere.
Let em hawk their caw and caw.
Population Drifts
© Carl Sandburg
NEW-MOWN hay smell and wind of the plain made her
a woman whose ribs had the power of the hills in
them and her hands were tough for work and there
was passion for life in her womb.
Poems Done on a Late Night Car
© Carl Sandburg
Lines based on certain regrets that come with rumination
upon the painted faces of women on
North Clark Street, Chicago
